the watson-based computer system generates millions of ideas out of the quintillions of possibilities, and then predicts which ones are the most surprising and pleasant. the system begins by capturing tens of thousands of existing recipes through natural language processing techniques to understand ingredient pairings, ingredient-cuisine pairings and dish composition, which it rearranges and redesigns into new recipes. it then cross references these with data on the chemistry of food ingredients, and the psychology of people’s likes and dislikes to model how the human palate might respond to different combinations of flavors.